​This August I had the chance to TA for the amazing Mel Douglas. It was a fantastic experience and I learned SO MUCH. Nancy Callan was also teaching her own class in the hotshop and two classes were assigned a co-lab that intertwined the hot show with the kiln and cold shops.

Surface finish samples

Below are some samles of an exercise I completed along with the class. Base.Body.Lip began with a premade glass sphere. I comleted 100 drawings of possible ways to finish the sphere and then after that. Coldworkng. Lots of coldworking.

​The Glass Art Society had their annual conference and it was in CORNING! Whoop Whoop. I was excited to be a demonstrating artist during the conference. My lecture, Pixelated Particles: Pate de Verre and the Printed Image was well attended and a little bit TERRIFYING. But I made it through ..

My printing on Pate de Verre samples

We also had a SIUC alumini reunion, complete with pizza. The turn out was great and it was SO COOL to see so many Salukis.

Oh hello SIUC

I also had some work in a juried show on Market Street in Corning. The show, Seeing Light, was a fantastic opportunity for me and I was very pleased with the way it was put together. The Arts Council of the Souther Finger Lakes has a great gallery space and I'm excited that they have invited me to have a solo show in 2017 ... More on that to come

How lucky am I? Two whole weeks at Penland School of Craft helping Jiyong Lee and Kirstie Rea as a Studio Assistant. These two are both amazing artist and incredibly skilled educators. I learned so much! Penland, as always, didn't disappoint. ​

Jiyong Lee and Kirstie Rea dropping knowledge.

This was my view for the entire two weeks as I chased these two all over trying to help.

Kirstie had a bevy of drawing exercises and small kiln projects.

We had the opportunity to visit some artist's studios while in North Carolina. These shots are from Mark Peiser's shop. What an incredible color in that tear drop piece.

I even had some time to practice new skills. Here's a finished shot of some of my lamination samples. All obsessively hand coldworked. I think you can see how some of my shape choice was influenced by our visit to Mark Peiser's studio.

Oh good lord they let me teach a one week intensive class! With the title of Not my Circus, Not my Monkeys, my focus was to cover the technique of pate de verre and to use language as a starting point for creation. The class covered several mold making techniques as well as exercises in idioms, phrases and figures of speech.

An orange, a knife and some alginate

My lovely TA, Alissa Friedman. She is *literally* burning the candle at both ends here.

​Early this summer I had a chance to do something out of the norm. As part of René Lalique: Enchanted by Glass, our show about René Lalique here at the Museum, I had the chance (and challenge) to make samples for the hands-on activities located at Explainer carts in the galleries.

Museum Explainers, the Museum’s high school and college student program, work throughout the galleries during the summer providing hands-on experiences and answering questions about glass and glassmaking at carts stationed throughout the glass galleries. They are extensively trained in the spring to learn all about glass. The purpose of Explainer carts is to help visitors to the Museum better understand glass history and glass processes. For the cart in the Lalique exhibition, we needed an example of glass casting created through a process called “lost wax” or “cire perdue.”

Here is a bare bones description about how I got from this . . .

​

To this . . . ​

I started with an oil based clay and created a sculpture of a bird. I based it off of this piece in our collection which was on display in the Lalique exhibition here at the Museum (Lalique’s is much nicer).

From that clay bird, I created an alginate mold. Many of you have experienced alginate before – it’s what the dentist uses to take a mold off your teeth! Alginate is a dried and ground​ seaweed that when rehydrated becomes a liquid that quickly turns into a flexible solid.

Mmmmmm, alginate

I then poured wax into the alginate mold. The resulting wax was a close copy of the clay and I could now make multiple waxes from the same alginate mold.

Liquid wax just poured into alginate

Finished Wax Hawk Heads

I then cleaned up the waxes.

I wanted the positives to look as good as possible before casting them – changing the material into glass won’t hide any of the imperfections in the mold, so it is best to get them out at this step while still using a malleable material.

Once I had the wax positive up to snuff, they are reinvested in a mixture of plaster and silica flour. This is another material that goes from being a liquid to a solid, however, plaster and silica are ridged and capable of withstanding the high temperatures required to melt glass whereas the alginate material is not.

All damned up and no where to go

The plaster mold ready to be steamed out

The plaster mold with the wax steamed out. These little guys got the CMOG logo stamped on them. You can see it in reverse in the top half of the photo

With the plaster hardened, the molds are placed on a steam table. Heat from the steam melts the wax and it flows out of the mold. With the wax steamed out, I am left with a bird-shaped hole in my plaster mold. This bird-shaped hole can be filled in a variety of ways.

​Our sample is solid cast glass; the entire cavity was filled with glass and the object is solid. With this type of mold you could also create a finished glass object using the pâte de verre technique, where you would fill the cavity with a glass paste to add color in specific places (watch a video). There is also a third option—you could blow a glass bubble directly into the cavity and end up with the same bird shape, but hollow—much like the cire perdue vessels in our Lalique exhibition.

The plaster mold loaded with glass, ready to be heated to 1500 degrees F

The casting process includes many steps, and, as you can see, it involves switching from positive to negative and back to positive and then back to negative. This complexity made it a good process for the Explainers to demonstrate because it can be so challenging to conceptualize.

While I have spent most of the last year focused on a new job in a new town I was invited to participate in a show in Cincinnati Ohio at Brazee Street Studio. SculpturalGlass ran April - May and it was fantastic to see the group of artist that participated. Below are photos of my work installed along with other invited artists.

Many random things come my way at The Studio. One recent fun project was with a group of high school art students that came for a two day series of classes at CMOG. They took an intensive glassblowing class, toured our library and museum and they spent some time with me learning about glass fusing. Here are some of their projects, All eighteen of them made a three layer fusing that played with depth and distortion.

I was chosen as one of four 2012 MFA graduates to participate in the Urban Glass MFA Exhibition. It is a national competition open to all glass artists who earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree in glass in the last academic year. Here are some images of new stuff that will be included in this show. I still have a lot of work ahead but it is nice to have the motivator of an impending show.

The Urban Glass MFA Exhibition open at 111 Front Street Galleries in Brooklyn New York on Februrary 7th from 5pm to 9pm. Come by and say hello if you are in the area.

In November I picked up and drove BACK across the county to take a job at the Corning Museum of Glass. My official job title is 'Special Projects Team Leader' at The Studio. The work involves many different activities. One of my favorite programs so far has been for 3rd graders our local County. The program is titled 'You Design It We Make It". All 3rd grade classes in Stuben participate. Prior to their visit to The Studio each student draws a picture of something they would like to have made into glass. As the gaffers for this extravaganza we pick one lucky drawing to make in front of the whole class, with design feed back from the original illustrator. Below is the "Mutant Lizard" drawing, the plan of attack and the finished project made in glass.